Hey, I’m Andrea Lemire, the education coordinator here at the Lion Brand Yarn Studio. I’m going to show you some really cool techniques for beginning crochet, and hopefully, you’ll have as much fun as I have with it. Okay, lets get started.

When you are looking for a crotchet pattern, there are a few things to keep in mind. A lot of people get hung up on skill level, such as beginner, intermediate, advanced. My advice to you is just read through the pattern. It’s just like a recipe. You need to read through it first to figure out what your prep work is, what you need to know to do it. And a lot of people get daunted if they don’t know, maybe, one or two things in it, but I say, try it out, go to your local yarn store for help, give it a shot. Because at best, you’re going to learn something new. At worst, maybe you’re not ready for it yet, and that’s okay. There are many different resources in terms of finding patterns out there. The Internet is a huge database for patterns. LionBrand.com has a ton of free patterns. We have over 3,000 free patterns on there. You can search for them through the pattern finder, but besides LionBrand.com, there’s a lot of other stuff out there. You can just type in ‘free pattern,’ print them out at home. You should definitely check out your local yarn store for patterns, too. Most local yarn stores do have a large magazine database. There’s some really gorgeous magazines out there that have great patterns in them. Books will also have how-to’s, not just the patterns, so that’s one good thing to think about when buying a book. Start building that library at home. I don’t know any yarn crafter who doesn’t have at least a couple yarn crafting books at home because that’s going to be your resource to go to if you’re not sure of a technique. So keep in mind, patterns do use abbreviations. They asse you know what they mean. Obviously, if you’re starting out, you probably don’t know what they mean. So you can ask at your local yarn store. You can also check out lionbrand.com under the ‘learning center.’ There’s a whole list of what all those tricky abbreviations mean, and a lot of them do actually link to a video of how to execute that stitch or step. You should definitely use that as a resource as well.